Florida International University FIU Digital Commons Frost Art Museum Catalogs Frost Art Museum 1-1-1984 Sculptors' Drawings 1910-1980, Selections from the Permanent Collection Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney Museum of American Art Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/frostcatalogs Recommended Citation Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, "Sculptors' Drawings 1910-1980, Selections from the Permanent Collection Whitney Museum of American Art" (1984). Frost Art Museum Catalogs. 6. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/frostcatalogs/6 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Frost Art Museum at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Frost Art Museum Catalogs by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Selections 338 o h Permanent Collection tors' • rawm I IO--I Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Itinerary Visual Arts Gallery, Florida International University, Miami Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma ... 'I� Christo Copyright © 1984 Museum of Running Fence, Project Whitney for Sonoma County and American Art Marin County, State of 945 Madison Avenue California, 1976 New York, New York Collage (pastel, charcoal, 10021 engineering data, cloth, and tape) on paper, Design ver 22 x 28 inches Homans / Salsgi Purchase, with funds Photographs from the Paul Rewald Geoffrey Clements Memorial Fund 77 .20 Paul Cummings Adjunct Curator, Drawings Sculptors'Drawings 1910-1980 The appreciation of sculptors' drawings has of expression-the emergence of an image recently increased with the growing recog­ from the imagination. The traditional em­ nition of the accomplishment, diversity, ployment of pen and ink or charcoal and and charm of these works. Such drawings pencil in the earIy decades of this century were often considered as mere sketches or precluded color. Black-and-white media are as steps toward three-dimensional expres­ used to clarify the formal aspects in a sion, but they are in fact as provocative drawing. Their presence indicates a and rewarding as those by painters and rigorous classicizing, whether in figurative other artists. Most of these drawings are or in abstract motifs. By mid-century, this S P fully rendered pages, completely resolved monochromatic tradition was challenged L,., works of art in themselves, although some by several sculptors who received early may serve as studies for specific sculp­ training as these were painters. Among w tures, earth works, installations, or even David Smith, Burgoyne Diller, Alexander paintings. Calder, Alfonso Ossorio, Claes Oldenburg, and Christo. In the tradition of mono­ The sculptor's attitudes toward the act chromatic delineation, the image was of and the use of drawing have developed often placed on the page with little or no markedly during the decades examined in suggestion of light, indication of scale, or this review. All drawing is concerned with reference to background. Scale resided in the enhancement of skill and with clarity Elie Nadelman Head of a Woman with Hat, c. 1923-25 Graphite on tracing vellum, 16! x IO� inches Purchase, with funds from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Vivian Horan, The List Purchase Fund, the Neysa McMein Purchase Award, Mr. and Mrs. William A. Marsteller, the Richard and Dorothy Rodgers Fund, and the Drawing Committee 83.34 the artist's mind, with the drawing func­ later refinements of Minimal art, which, tioning as a referential annotation of pose, by the time of its emergence, had elimi­ configuration, or view. In drawings of the nated all human referents for an imagery figure, our experience in life suggests scale regimented by geometric order. This can be in art. But with abstract drawings, there is observed in the Neo-plastic configurations no possibility for such personal references of Burgoyne Diller, the flat hard-edge bio­ to subject or scale. morphics of Isamu Noguchi, the ritualized gestures of Sol LeWitt, and the spatially The decorative implications in the balanced pure geometric abstraction of early drawings of Elie Nadelman, Reuben Ellsworth Kelly. These styles reduced the Nakian, or Louise Nevelson uphold an handwritten gesture of the freely drawn older tradition rather than strive to assimi­ line, relying instead on the conceptual late the thriving modern impulses already impulse and a certain rendering skill to so active in the first decades of this maintain the motivation which initially century. The linear refinements of Art provoked the drawing. Deco are apparent in these elegant formal figures. The elongated torsos presage the Concurrent with this rigid classicizing, the surreal impulse informed an ever­ widening segment of American art, al- Nancy Grossman Ibram Lassaw Untitled Drawing, 1970 Untitled, 1967 Lithograph crayon on Ink on paper, 13� x 16 coated paper, 40 x 26 inches inches Purchase, with funds from Gift of Evelyn and the Neysa McMein Purchase Leonard Lauder 78.80 Award 77.30 though the artists did not follow exactly Sculptors' drawings differ from those of the literary, political, and psychological other artists in several ways. Many exhibit orientation of European Surrealism. The a certain flatness of design in a vision that fecund nature of Surrealist thought freed often stresses pattern or plan, as in archi­ American artists from the constraints of tectural drawings. A kind of airless space is old master influence, of regionalism, and experienced even where tone is employed of geometric abstraction, while sanction­ to suggest plasticity. Shading does not ing the retention of an individual hand­ always function to differentiate planes, nor writing in a time of rapidly expanding does it always turn a given plane plas­ styles. This process is observed in the tically in space. Even where internal shad­ drawings that combine natural and me­ ing is used, it often results in a flat field of chanical forms into often disquieting im­ tone. The employment or the casual dis­ ages, such as those by Theodore Roszak, missal of light results in a pervasive still­ Herbert Ferber, Alfonso Ossorio and, later, ness in many of these drawings. The Richard Hunt. These transformed Sur­ effects are generally those of implied realist precepts stimulated artists' minds rather than described illumination. There and emotions without binding them to is little or no emphasis on light function- ordered, orthodox theories of the kind advanced by Andre Breton. Ellsworth Kelly Briar, 1963 Pencil on paper, 22� x 28i inches Purchase, with funds from the Neysa McMein Purchase Award 65.42 Alexander Calder Four Black Dots, 1974 Gouache on paper, 29! x 43 inches Gift of the Howard and lean Lipman Foundation, Inc. 74.94 ing in a form-defining chiaroscuro. This sculptures. The control of the drawing frequently sourceless light evenly overlays materials, as in any art object, reveals the page and its design, an effect that may qualities of both skill and concept. If the be noted in sheets ranging from those of lines are weak and lack specificity in their Elie Nadelman and Alexander Calder to direction, color, texture, or manipulation, Ellsworth Kelly and Alan Saret. the drawing will gradually lose its appeal. If the concept is not clearly stated upon Most of these drawings are made with the cessation of work, the image will not traditional drawing materials. Sculptors appear as the holistic experience of a develop their images with a directness that reasoned or thoughtfully felt action. The remains even when they turn to three­ interweaving of skill and concept sustains dimensional expression. Collage, an ad­ the life of the drawing whether its style is ditive or a constructive process, is used in currently fashionable or not. It is that many of the drawings, including those by blend of imagination, insight, skill, and Lucas Samaras, Michael Heizer, Christo, experience which forges an art charged and Ellsworth Kelly. In each instance, the with the necessary vitality for longevity. diverse qualities of touch in the drawing are then aggrandized in the constructed Burgoyne Diller Claes Oldenburg Second Theme, 1938 Proposal for a Cathedral Pencil and crayon on in the Form of a Colossal paper, I2! x 12� inches Faucet, Lake Union, Purchase, with funds Seattle, 1972 from The List Purchase Watercolor, graphite, and Fund 79.5 colored pencil on paper, 29 x 22� inches Gift of Knoll Interna­ tional and pur;chase 80.35 Until the late I930S color was used tinued to paint throughout his life, proba­ cautiously in American drawings, es­ bly employed a palette of the greatest pecially by sculptors. It was employed coloristic magnitude. George Segal uses occasionally to tone an area with wash or broadly applied pastel on colored paper in to define a background. Its prominence has his asymmetrical compositions. Claes increased from the I940S to the present so Oldenburg's spatial differentiations are that it is now used unquestioningly by emphasized by a lavish use of luminous nearly everyone. Burgoyne Diller used watercolor. This is also a favored medium color to enrich the range of tonal values of H.C. Westermann and William T. Wiley, and to specify the spatial relationships of a master at the closely controlled, layered the different planes in his compositions. application of this refulgent material. His work is an example of how the Robert Arneson employs a broad spectrum American artist transformed Mondrian's of crayons, colored pencils, gouache, and Neo-plastic concepts. Calder often used other materials in a bold manner that color as a background wash upon which he produces the dense textured surfaces of his drew either his nature-inspired shapes or ongoing series of dramatic revelatory self­ the Mir6esque geometric forms which also portraits. Color aggrandizes the exuberant appear in his sculpture.